Media Storm - What does a ‘free press’ really mean?

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Print is dying. Since the arrival of the internet and fast-paced, free information at the tap of the finger, the news outlets that tell us what’s what have been scrambling to find their footing. Some have been haemorrhaging money for decades, others have become richer than ever. But at what cost? In this special feature to launch our NEXT SEASON, Helena and Mathilda break down the different funding models that make up our mainstream media. They look at the ongoing warfare between ethical interests and economic ones and ask what it really means to be independent in journalism today. We also hear all their plans for the coming new season! Watch. This. Space. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello listeners and welcome back to MediaStorm, the investigative news podcast that starts with the people. You're going to have to say investigativism again? I was definitely an extra syllable of that. I was like, did I get away with that? I'm going to change it. You're going to change our strap line? Yeah.

Hello listeners and welcome back to MediaStorm, the news and investigation podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. Shit me. She changed it. I've actually thought about it too much so I won't be able to say it. Take two.

Helena Wadia. Hello. And I, Matilda Malinson, are here to take you to new corners of society and put minorities back at the centre of their stories. From refugees to sex workers,

survivors to prisoners, indigenous groups to trans people, many communities caught in the eye of the media storm are denied a fair voice in the coverage around them. We want to restore right of reprim. to the marginalise and maligned and to give you the tools you need to take the mainstream media with a pinch of salt. This series, prepare to meet everyone from resistance fighters to stateless

people, from far-right grooming victims to illegal medicinal cannabis users. And you can scroll through past episodes and see which voices are waiting to show you a brand new side of the story. But before we relaunch, there's something important we need to talk about. On this bonus episode, we're going to break down what's causing mainstream media mishaps. We often talk on the show about the social factors such as lack of newsroom diversity or implicit bias. Or the political factors such as culture wars or binary left-right concepts of impartiality. The third theme that keeps coming up is economic factors.

Money! What happens when a media puts commercial interests over public service ones? Today, we're going to talk about how our... our news media is paid for and how the fuck to navigate it as independent journalists at war with clickbait. In an ideal world, news reporting is a public service industry. It's designed to educate the public and hold authorities to account. But in a capitalist world, news reporting is a commercial industry too. It is designed to generate revenue, not only to cover its costs, but sometimes to make shareholders richer.

Fun fact. Ooh, yay. Hit me. Fun fact. Fun fact. I've got a fun fact. Did I hear that you had a fun fact? Here's a fun fact for you.

The funest. And when I say the funnest. Here is the funnest fact you're ever going to here. I'm so excited. Yeah. 90% of UK media is owned and controlled by just three companies. Oh my God, that is fun. That's just so fun. It's more like incredibly depressing that. Companies, I guess, that are in turn owned by highly influential billionaires. Exactly. Can you name them? Okay, well, there's DMG media, which I know because they seemed to own half of the news organisations in the building we last worked in, including the Daily Mail, the Metro,

iNews. Yes, DMG accounts for nearly 40% of weekly newspaper circulation and is majority owned by one of our nobleman, which yes, we still have. The Viscount Rothermeir, aka Jonathan Harmsworth. Then I'm guessing there's News UK, one of Rupert Murdoch's babies. Correct. That includes the sun, the times and the Sunday times. To be honest, I don't know what the third is. Okay, so the third is REACH PLC, which owns papers like the mirrors, the stars and the expresses. Okay. And how do these news organisations make their money?

Well, that's the ultimate question. So since the arrival of the internet and fast-paced digitised information, the news industry's traditional paper-selling business model has been obliterated. And the industry is essentially still on its needs trying to pick up the people. Although a small number of papers, like the Daily Mail, still draw massive revenue from paper circulation, most outlets struggle to actually pay their journalists decent salaries. Don't I know it? When we were working at the evening standard, some of us on salaries under 20K, I believe the

words our editor-in-chief used were that the paper was hemorrhaging money. Which brings us on to type number one for funding journalism. advertising so the evening standard is actually a good model for this given it's a free paper and therefore it depends for profit entirely on ad revenue but you also see this with the bulk of digital news websites websites that slap ads all over their news articles so you're not even sure what you're reading if it's the article or an ad or they spew light lifestyle content embedded with e-commerce links so let's talk downsides for advertising the downsides of advertising are similar to the downsides with having to sell...

What was that? An ad. The downsides of advertising, they're similar to the downsides with having to sell individual newspapers day by day. So you're constantly selling, meaning you have to instantly grab the attention of passers-by. Right. So we basically have the advertising model to thank for the takeover of sensationalist clickbait

journalism. Exactly. And as we've seen on most episodes of Media Storm, sensationalism often leads to to us and them narratives that tend to demonise, marginalise groups, see, for example, the rhetoric surrounding migrants, aka refugees and asylum seekers. Which we wouldn't dare say

was reminiscent of, say, 1930s, Germany, would we now? Oh my God, God forbid, we wouldn't say that. Having sat on digital news desks, I know I speak for both of us when I say that it's basically a factory line. When news outlets have to meet advertiser set traffic quotas. It creates a lot of pressure for quantity over quality. Digital journalists are

often deskbound. We're having to produce dozens of articles a day basically out of recycled online material with no time to pursue quality investigations or least of all seek out minority lived experience and first-hand accounts. Exactly. Next up then, if you're not following the advertiser model, is digital fondling. Oh, tell me. more. When I discover what that is, I'll tell you more. So digital funding model number two is paywalls. So paywalls and subscription-based journalism has enabled some amazing reporting because it allows outlets to invest in long-term investigations and at least theoretically pay their staff properly. Right, but obviously paywalls, that comes with the problem of access because only

people who can afford to pay are exposed to that information. And I think we both believe that journalism should be open access, that a free press is good for more than one reason. Exactly. What happens then when you end up with hugely important content behind a paywall? A recent example being The Telegraph releasing Matt Hancock's WhatsApp. You had to pay to see those. And if you couldn't afford to pay, you were restricted from content that affects your lives as much as it affects anybody else's. Yeah. And that story is actually quite a good example of how paywall news can maybe feed the fake news economy because a lot of the necessary context

in which those WhatsApps were sent was lost in the wider reporting that this story was out there. I actually think that the Telegraph actively put out very unnuenced anecdotes to help sell their exclusive content on Matt Hancock by making it sound as scandalous as possible. And so the thing is,

even if an article is behind a paywall, the headline can still go viral and spark all of this interest and speculation without providing all the facts. And then people might go search elsewhere to fill the gaps somewhere free and less reliable and fake news. Exactly. If we move swiftly on, there are public service models that are not run for profit. Those do exist.

And the big one is... The BBC. The BBC. So talk us through that funding model. So the BBC is mostly funded by the licence fee, which is obligatory for almost all UK households that watch or record any live TV or use any BBC services. It means editors neither have to attract as many clicks as possible,

nor do they have to please the taste of wealthy subscription-paying audiences. In theory, their funding was secure. Right, and I remember on my journalism degree, learning about this model and being taught that it has led to the BBC becoming one of the most trusted news institutions in the world. And what really struck me in that lecture was that when Western trust in the mainstream media plummeted 20 years ago, which for context was after the invasion of Iraq, when many of these news outlets basically were found complicit in spreading false rumors about weapons of mass destruction, rumors that were ultimately used to justify

the Western invasion. When that trust fell apart, the BBC's reputation was less damaged than many of those other mainstream outlets, which is quite something given that it's kind of the one outlet depending on the government for its paycheck. Right. And how has it protected its independent reputation? Q Matilda, it's your favourite word. Oh God, impartiality.

Impartiality. Yeah, okay, but when you exist within a two-party political framework, Impartiality apparently means that you present every story as a bipartisan left-wing versus right-wing debate, which isn't exactly reality, but that's another bonus episode. Not that we don't talk about it on every single episode of Media Storm, but the issue with its funding model is that the line between having state-controlled funding and state-controlled news is thin, and there have been times in history where it's fallen into question, times like now. Crucial to understand here, I guess, is the fact that the government holds the power to change the BBC's funding model in the not too far future. So while the BBC may not need to suck up to its audiences, it kind of needs to suck up to its government. At least it does if the government shows any sign they're ready to use their power and cut their funding. And we've seen a lot of that from the Conservative government.

Do you know who Nadine Dorries is? Forrest Johnson's loyal ally and former culture saying. She tweets continuously about the license fee, essentially dangling the BBC's funding over its head. This, I'm just going to say it, I think directly explains why the BBC has provided such weak coverage of the consequences of Brexit. The Brexit faction of the government, if we remember, gave the BBC hell for being supposedly anti-Brexit during the campaign. And there's definitely some truth in saying that the BBC didn't do a good job of representing how much of the population actually. actually did want to leave the EU. But as that faction has become ever more powerful and actively threatened the BBC's funding, we have seen the BBC become far more compliant and all but abdicate

responsibility for properly analysing Brexit today. Listen to our episode from series two about Eastern European exploitation. Plug, plug. But with this growing political influence, we've seen a decline in public trust. Suspicion growing over Boris Johnson. appointment of Richard Sharp as the BBC chairman, a man allegedly involved in helping Boris secure an 800 grand loan guarantee while he was Prime Minister. And dare we get started on Gary Lineca Gate? Or do we just sum it up like this?

Funding model type, is it three we're on? Yeah, funding model type three might close the door to commercial influence, but it opens it up to political influence. So what is left? money given from the goodness of one's heart money given with no strings attached donations no such thing as a free lunch right

donor led journalism though that's the model used by outlets like the Guardian that attempt to avoid reliance on advertising or paywalls and they ask readers to pay if and what they can a tricky game but we did see in 2019 them break even for the first time in 20 years but access to donations

on this level tend to be limited to mainstream outlets with huge audiences. I e not arse. I e not us. If it can be sourced, however, this strikes me as a route that truly allows for the highest integrity of journalism. Okay, so time to be honest. There's one other reason we're talking about this today than just to share what is going wrong in the media. And it's to update you about where we have been since we wrapped our last season in December.

We've loved Making Media Storm and are so proud of what we and the guilty feminists have built with so few resources to hand. But in order for the podcast to become financially sustainable, we need a little boost. Don't worry, listeners, we're not telling you to cough up. We've actually been trying to fundraise from organisations that have a record in supporting independent journalism and who believe in our mission of platforming minority voices. Also, groups that don't attach any editorial conditions to their funding, not the easiest hunt in the world. But we are pleased to say that we have had some success

and we are planning to relaunch series three of Media Storm next month with a vengeance. I'm so excited. We are going to keep doing whatever we can to bring you new voices and hold the mainstream media to account and we promise you now we will never accept funding that compromises our editorial independence.

We will never accept being told what we can and can't investigate. So we want to thank you for your patience and ask you to stand by. And if there's anything our listeners can do to help us, it's keep tuning in and keep spreading the word. Send an episode of MediaStorm to every single one of your WhatsApp groups. I know you're in over 100. Subscribe and turn on your alert so you know when we're back on your feed.

And thank you so much for joining us today. So we'll see you next month for a whole new season, bringing you news that starts with the people that are normally asked last. For now, I'm Mattelda Mallinson, and I'm Helena Wadia, and this is Media Storm. You know,